How One Writer Wrestled With Her Role as a First—and Second—Wife

The couple posing in the Helmut Newton photo above looks both jubilant and mocking. The woman standing next to them, her fist clenched against her hip, is clearly irritated. Has she just lost her lover? And why are the two women dressed in such flamboyant shades of red? I associate the color with passion and rage. Will the woman with the clenched fist throw her glass of wine in the other woman’s face? If she did, I would hardly blame her. But hers was not my experience.

I was very young when I married my first husband—let’s call him Jim—and very much in love, as I assume he was. Clear as day I can recall our picture-perfect wedding—my white lace dress, my bouquet, the three-tier cake—and how certain I was that the marriage would last forever. Immediately after the reception, we flew to Madrid, then to Rome, still later to Bangkok, continuing on to points farther and farther away. Without a plan for our future, we led a nomadic existence. Jim wanted to be a painter, I a writer. But in the first heady years of our married life, adventures intervened.

To please Jim, I reinvented myself from a quiet, bookish girl to an intrepid sportswoman: I learned to fish, shoot a gun, pluck ducks. At first I was happy to do so. Sleep in a Thai jungle hammock while being eaten alive by mosquitoes? Fine. Never any hot water to wash my hair? Who cares? But after a few years of this itinerant life, I grew impatient and less obliging. I read books again and began to write. “Where is your spirit of adventure?” Jim complained. Had I become boring and fat? I didn’t care. Then, too, there were babies.

The promiscuous, irresponsible sixties also played their part, and slowly but surely, we fell out of love with each other, and Jim fell in love with—let’s call her Mary. After seven years of marriage, Jim and I divorced. Soon after, I flew to Nevada. I was 31 years old, and I had never been out West. Right away, I fell in love with the high desert, the thinner air, the tumbleweed.

Of course I resented Mary. On account of the children, however—by then there were three—I had to remain civil. I had to negotiate visits and vacation schedules with her. I also kept my ear to the ground for any infraction on her part. The children were not forthcoming. “Yeah, she’s OK” or “Yeah, we had a nice time” was the extent of the information I could glean from them. Proud, I tried not to canvass mutual friends for opinions, but sometimes it was hard to resist. “Do they seem happy to you?” I asked. Or “Have you noticed how old she looks now?”

In time, the meanness stopped—almost miraculously. Jim and Mary had a baby, a boy. I don’t recall why, but I invited Mary to come to my house and have tea (by then I was a second wife myself, and perhaps I felt more kindly toward her). She came and brought her son, who was just a few weeks old. Her baby looked exactly like one of my babies. I wanted to snatch him from her. He could have been mine.

Looking back on my experience as a first wife, I think I had a feeling of entitlement: I was there first. Perhaps, like Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, I never wanted to completely relinquish the throne. And, after all, if we were British and Jim was king of England, my children would succeed him. Jim went on to divorce Mary and marry yet again, and I have to admit to a certain Schadenfreude, since none of his marriages lasted. His failed relationships put to rest the slight gnawing doubt I always felt that perhaps I had not been an entirely adequate wife. But still, to this day, if ever I am asked to describe the pecking order of Jim’s wives, I like to joke that I was the tallest.

As a second wife, married to, let’s call him Jules, I brought three children to the marriage, and since Jules had three of his own, we had our own Brady Bunch. Ours, however, was not a family comedy. It was an ongoing drama. The children fought among themselves and eyed their new stepparents with various degrees of antagonism or, worse, indifference. Overwhelmed, I sought the help of a therapist, who prescribed Valium. As a stepmother, I tried to be a benign presence. Mostly I wanted to be liked—no, loved. I distinctly remember a scene at dinner where one of my stepchildren kept kicking under the table after I had repeatedly asked him to stop. My patience exhausted, I sent him upstairs to his room. Instead, he left the house and went to his mother’s.

Their mother, my second husband’s first wife—let’s call her Ann—was a formidable presence. Not particularly friendly, she showed no interest in me (although to be clear, I had nothing to do with her divorce, since I met Jules years later). At school graduations, and later at weddings, she avoided me, but I was always aware of her presence. She was like a ghost in the marriage. Had Jules been happier with her? Had he loved her more? Was she better in bed? All these questions tended to haunt me—especially in the early days. I tried to be discreet and not pry. I avoided asking my stepchildren about her, hiding my curiosity—or was it my jealousy?

There were old albums filled with photos of Jules and Ann at christenings, birthdays, Christmases; on cruises in Greece, on skiing trips in Switzerland. In private I studied these, trying to discern whether she looked happy. It was hard to tell. She rarely smiled. My husband, Jules, too, was not forthcoming about Ann. He rarely spoke of her, or if he did, his remarks were neutral. I did learn that she was artistic and highly intelligent, and I found myself sometimes fantasizing that, had the circumstances been different, we might have been friends.

There is no simple way to characterize my role as a second wife. But, older, I was more thoughtful, more self-aware than I had been in my previous marriage. And, more important, I deeply loved and admired my second husband, emotions very different from those I felt for my first. Jim and I were opposites, and I was drawn to his notions of romance and adventure. Jules and I had more in common; we were steadier.

Time passed. The children, mine and his, are now grown up, and they all get along and genuinely like one another. Every few years, we have a large and happy family reunion. The years have dulled many emotional sharp edges. Whenever I see Mary, my first husband’s second wife, at a family occasion, we greet each other cordially and talk easily. I am particularly fond of her son, who I once thought could be mine. As for Ann, my second husband’s first wife, whose children I love, I regret that we never became friends.

One of my favorite lines is from a Jack Gilbert poem: “We must risk delight,” he admonishes, before cautioning us not to dwell on injustice. My latest novel, Sisters, explored a second wife’s obsession with the first wife, and in it she aspires to just that. The book is not autobiographical, yet some personal details always manage to slip in. For instance, in one of the novel’s scenes, I have the first wife wear my own elegant Jil Sander gray silk suit. I gave it to her as a so-to-speak gift. I wanted her to look good.